THIS COULD BE YOUR HAPPY DAY

Mileta Prodanovic

Stage adaptation: Masa Jeremic
Direction: Stevan Bodroza
Stage movement: Carni Djeric (Isidora Stanisic)
Scenography: Zoran Ristic
Costumes: Dragica Pavlovic
Music composed by: Vedran Vucic
Production: BELEF and Belgrade Theatre of Drama

Casts:
He: Pavle Pekic
His wife: Vanja Milacic
Milica, the dog: Vanja Ejdus

Mileta Prodanovic, writer and painter was born in Belgrade in 1959. He published books of prose The Dinner at St. Aplonius (1983), The New Kids (1989), Accounts of Travels through Images and Tags (1993), A Dog with a Broken Spine (1993, 2000), The Sky Opera (1995), Dance Monster, on My Gentle Music (1996,2000), The Red Scarf, All of Silk (1999) and This Could Be Your Happy Day, a collection of poems Myasma (1994) and a book of travel accounts The Eye on the Road (2000). Exhibited and participated in many individual and group exhibitions. Works and lives in Belgrade. Publishes his works in the publishing houses Vreme knjige since 1995 and Stubovi kulture since September 1996.

Stevan Bodroza was born in Belgrade in 1978. He graduated Theatre and Radio Direction at the Faculty of Drama, University of Belgrade. Direction works: The Mother and Child by June Fosset for the Belgrade Theatre of Drama; Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by Reiner Werner Fassbinder, for the New stage of the BTD; The Face in Fire by Marius von Mayenburg for Beton - hala theatre, BELEF; The Coast and the Dumpsite by Heiner Mueller, for Beton - hala theatre BELEF; Medeia by Heiner Mueller, for Garage of the National Theatre, BELEF; Generative Space for Centre for Cultural Decontamination, BITEF (Alter Image Programme, group direction).

Stage adaptation note

In his novel ‘This Could Be Your Happy Day’ Mileta Prodanovic focuses on the absurdity of life of a younger generation Belgrade family. (He, His Wife, and Milica, their Dog) during the NATO air raids against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999. The author emphasises the daily absurdity of survival in the Balkans at the time with the fact that the US Green Card Lottery is being picked up by a dog, who thereafter stops being a home pet and starts talking.

The team tries to sift the author's focus, fraught with local paraphrase but also with phrases of the "brave new world" through the prism of their own intimate horror and torture, but also through the universal associations, giving the calamity of a small nation a dimension of global horror, and dramaturgy of schizophrenic collapse. The world we live in is a double madhouse, ruled by small dictators, big "fighters for democracy", and evil women while everything is being overwhelmed by the "struggle for power" turning the obedient dog to a man and the man into a rabid dog.

Maša Jeremić

Director’s notes

This Could Be Your Happy Day is a play inspired by bombing of the already non-existing Yugoslavia during spring 1999, the last in the series of wars waged in the area in nineties. However, the bombing is just a point of departure, the historic moment when the unusual travel towards the nightmares of modern civilisation starts. Those nightmares are made of music clips, the documentary features of destruction around the world brought about by modern gods of war and of the anxiety of the contemporary mankind, deprived of the possibility to truly influence the reality.

The nightmare is dreamt by Him, His Wife and their dog Milica one night during the bombing. The three are totally ordinary Belgrade inhabitants. Mister and Misses Everyone and No-one.

The doors of surrealism and fantasy, in fact the metaphoric world, are being opened by a strange incident following the hit of a bomb, when all of a sudden the dog starts talking and the process of its "humanisation" begins. The situation is additionally complicated, strengthening the fantastic aspect of the play when the dog, apart from starting to talk gets the Green Card, as a result of its master’s sheer prank by putting the dog's name on the US lottery for the US citizenship. In such a way the dog is not being transformed into just any man, but into an American, presented in this play as a Super Human, the higher form of existence and the state of consciousness. At the same time He and His Wife are passing through a series of humiliations and human right’s discriminations, sliding slowly into something that could be referred as Dog's Life.

Like in the German morality play Jederman (Everybody), these ordinary characters are passing through a different universe, unrealistic and reverie-like at first sight, but in fact a wholly concrete world surrounding us.

The play This Could Be Your Happy Day represents an attempt to find a real-world form for this structure. It is an extraordinary treatment of the subject from the world politics and current international situation that were initiated in the universe of the modern cabaret, sifted through the prism of the fantasy and strong satire of the community.

Stevan Bodroža